Associate Investigator

Contact Details

External Address

School of Psychology and Speech Pathology
Curtin University

Profile

My research interests fall into the broad areas of biological, clinical, or social psychology. They are conducted experimentally using a range of different measures (physiological: EMG, autonomic responses; behavioural: eye movements, reaction time; self report). I currently lead three major research projects:

• The acquisition and extinction of human fear: It is now accepted that fear and other emotions (positive ones as well) are learned. However, the characteristics of this learning (under which conditions does it occur; how is it influenced by cognition; how does emotional learning relate to other learning) are not well understood. We have used traditional fear conditioning paradigms (see for instance Rowles et al., 2012) and evaluative learning paradigms (e.g., Lipp et al., 2010) to answer these questions.

• The emotional face: Some facial expressions of emotion are said to be processed preferentially relative to others (face in the crowd effect) and even under conditions of minimal stimulus input. However, there are also reports that question this claim. Moreover, little is known about the manner in which emotional expressions are processed (holistically vs. feature based) and how processing of facial expressions interacts with the processing of other facial characteristics such as age, sex, or race. We use behavioural (Savage et al., 2012) and physiological paradigms (Bramwell et al., 2014) to address these questions.

• The Science of Learning: While experimental psychology has contributed greatly to our understanding of associative learning, less is known about more complet forms of learning such as the learning done by students in class. This project is concerned with the mechanisms that mediate the testing effect (repeated testing can facilitate learning more than repeated practise) and how biases (stability bias in memory) affect learning outcomes.

Recent External Appointments

Fellow, Association for Psychological Science. (2014 continuing)

Fellow, Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. (2008 continuing)